When Phantasy Star Online came out for Dreamcast way back in 2001 we were treated to something new. I know marriages that took less effort to end than this.You wouldn't. I'm off to go try and end my relationship with PSU again. XBL is such a great service in most respects, and I will happily extol its virtues to anyone who's willing to listen to me, but this kind of financial manipulation just plain leaves a bad taste in my mouth. If I can sign up for it online, through XBL, with just a few presses of the A button, why the hell can't I cancel it the same way? The simple answer, of course, is that they want to make it as hard as possible to quit as they can, so that they can get a few more bucks out of you, and that, my friends, is hella lame. It's the fact that I have to call to cancel this account in the first place that's annoying. That's not even what's really bugging me, despite the fact that said snafus have cost me about $20-$30 at this point. Thing is, I know that sometimes there are snafus with customer service, fine, whatever. Now I'm getting into "pissed off" territory. Each time I was assured that the membership had been dropped, and yet each month, that $9.99 is charged to me. I foolishly assumed something similar would happen with Universe. Here's where you may be shaking your head at my stupidity, but in my own defense, the Hunter's Licenses of Phantasy Star Online expired if you didn't renew them regularly if you stopped playing, you stopped paying. I put in maybe about 20 hours online before deciding that it wasn't worth the effort, and promptly forgot about it and its monthly fee.
I tried to love it, I really did, but it never became the obsession that the other versions did.
Not bad, really, just not nearly as addictive as its *Online *cousins. Want to know what happened next? Of course you do. I fired up the game, punched in my credit card info, and started playing. Again, I didn't mind, because a basic change in the game's structure designed to cut down on cheating-keeping all my online data server side, as opposed to console-side-seemed worth the relatively small bump in price, especially if it prevented all those asshats with duped items or hacked Mags. The price to play had gone up since the *Online *days then it was $15 for a three month block, now it was $9.99 a month, on top of my yearly subscription to Xbox Live. I had, after all, invested hundreds and hundreds of hours on the previous version of Phantasy Star Online, and thoroughly expected to do the same with *Universe, *so paying a bit extra to play each month didn't faze me all that much. Although many squawked about Phantasy Star Universe's pay-to-play fee, I was fine with it.
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